This blog describes Metatime in the Posthuman experience, drawn from Sir Isaac Newton's secret work on the future end of times, a tract in which he described Histories of Things to Come. His hidden papers on the occult were auctioned to two private buyers in 1936 at Sotheby's, but were not available for public research until the 1990s.

Kristoffer Koch invested 150 kroner ($26.60) in 5,000 bitcoins in
2009, after discovering them during the course of writing a thesis on
encryption. He promptly forgot about them until widespread media
coverage of the anonymous, decentralised, peer-to-peer digital currency in April 2013 jogged his memory.

Bitcoins are stored in encrypted wallets secured with a private key,
something Koch had forgotten. After eventually working out what the
password could be, Koch got a pleasant surprise:

"It said I had 5,000 bitcoins in there. Measuring that in today's rates it's about NOK5m ($886,000)," Koch told NRK.

Typically bitcoins are bought using traditional currency from a
bitcoin "exchanger", although due to strict anti-money laundering
controls, the process can can be tricky. A user can then withdraw those
bitcoins by sending them back to an exchanger like Mt Gox, the best known bitcoin exchange, in return for cash.

However, bitcoin is gaining more and more traction within the
physical world too. It is now possible to actually spend bitcoins
without exchanging them for traditional currency first in a few British pubs, including the Pembury Tavern in Hackney, London, for instance. On 29 October, the world's first bitcoin ATM also went online in Vancouver, Canada, which scans a user's palm before letting them buy or sell bitcoins for cash. ... In August, Germany recognised bitcoin as a "unit of account", allowing the country to tax users or creators of the digital currency.

Crucially, not all other countries and authorities have not followed Germany's lead. Warnings against Bitcoins come alongside reports of the currency's ever-growing practical circulation as people simply don't listen:

Bitcoin should not be seen as a currency - Ernst and Young, Guardian(11 December 2013)

"Waves Coffee House is one of at least 20 businesses in Vancouver [Canada] that currently accept bitcoins." Image Source: CBC.

Despite the warnings, speculation has driven the price of 1 Bitcoin to a value of between USD $600 and USD $1,000. See CoinDesk's Bitcoin price index, here. But for speculators, the time to buy Bitcoins should have been between 2009 and 2012, when they were worth a few dollars.

Two cultural spheres are appearing around these financial activities: the first is the
older financial world we know well, which is only partly virtual, but theoretically still grounded in reality; and the second is the Millennial,
completely virtual world. Bitcoins diverge radically from the stable currencies associated with the nation-state establishment and the whole economic and governmental order built around that establishment. The new virtual currencies are completely surreal and chaotic, like a bad dream in a dystopian sci-fi novel. Welcome to what designers of the movie Aeon Fluxcalled, the "burning garbage can vision of the future." Bitcoins are traded by iPhones in coffee shops and pubs, or in online chatrooms, rather than banks. The exchanges are vulnerable to hackers and theft. The currency also suffers from price fragmentation; that is, it varies in price on different online exchanges in the world. In this regard, Bitcoins differ from major national currencies; from CoinDesk:

The US dollar and other major national currencies effectively trade at
the same price, regardless of whether they are exchanged in Tokyo,
London, New York, or any other major foreign exchange market. ... The reason for the near-perfect price synchronization we see in major
currencies like the US dollar relates to an economic concept known as
the ‘law of one price’.

Put simply, this concept means that prices for fungible,
freely-traded items like currency should be equal across all open
markets.

If we were to observe any material, persistent price
variation between US dollars exchanged in Tokyo versus those exchanged
in London, then this would be due to the existence of some cost or
barrier – like variations in transaction fees, the speed at which
information can travel, transportation expenses, or restrictions to the
flow of funds. However, we do not observe any such variance, due to the very low frictions across the major forex markets.

In contrast to the forex markets for major currencies like the US
Dollar, at any given moment the bitcoin exchange rate can vary by tens
or hundreds of dollars from one exchange to the next.

For example,
approximately a week before bitcoin first crossed the $1,000 mark on
Mt. Gox, the price of bitcoin had already reached the renminbi
equivalent of $1,000 on China’s largest exchange, BTC China.

Following
the recent announcement by Chinese authorities that banks would no
longer be able to transact with bitcoin (which, in turn, triggered
Baidu’s decision to suspend its acceptance of bitcoin), the price on 5th
December as of 08:30 GMT had plummeted in China by a renminbi
equivalent of approximately $177 more than prices on exchanges located
outside of China ... .

Should the bitcoin market continue to grow in the months and years
ahead, it would be reasonable to expect a decline in price fragmentation
across the various exchanges as trading volume and liquidity increase.

For
the time being, however, relatively illiquid markets alongside the
barriers which have been erected around and between the various bitcoin
exchanges will continue to drive price fragmentation.

Bloombergposted reports this week on how to buy Bitcoins and commented on the virtual currency's shaky prices. See these videos - and an interview from the Guardian with one of Bitcoin's self-proclaimed developers - below the jump. Bitcoins will be supplied, this designer declares, until 2030, after which the supply will stop. But whether he actually was a Bitcoin developer or not is debatable. The original Bitcoin protocol was designed in 2008 by a person or group of people working under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.

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About Me

Welcome to my blog, dedicated to the aporia, anomie, mysteries, and nervous tensions of the turn of the Millennium. I'm a writer and academic, trained in the field of history. These are my histories of things that define the spirit of our times. This blog also goes beyond historians' visions of the past, and examines how metatime and time are perceived in other media and disciplines, between generations, and in high and pop culture.